Padres at Astros

HOUSTON 
Very much a long, tall Texan, Andrew Cashner is Texas through and through, clean through TCU. It’s presently hot as hell, yet it’s his heaven, and it’s his home.

“Why do you think I’m so excited?” said Cashner, the Padres’ hard-throwing right-hander. “I’ve been in Texas for three weeks.”

Seemed a real shame, it did, that Cashner had never pitched in the actual Texas League until the Padres sent him to Double-A San Antonio on June 10. When the Padres did so, it was great news for Cashner for more reasons than one, the biggest being that San Diego was making a starter of him again.

And it will be in Texas — 42.3 miles from his home in Conroe, to be exact — that Cashner officially goes back to being the long-haul pitcher in the majors that he was growing up and playing college ball in the Lone Star State. That the opponent for Cashner’s first full-fledged start is the Astros is serendipitous, too, given that he was raised an Astros fan.

“I was at Game Six (of the 2007 NLCS),” said Cashner, 25, “the one where (Albert) Pujols hit one out of the stadium, over the (railroad) tracks.”

Cashner’s first career strikeout was Astros slugger Carlos Lee on June 6, 2010, at Minute Maid Park. His first win was over the Astros on July 20 of that rookie year at Wrigley Field.

The timing of this occasion is not without a twist, too. Cashner’s return to the Padres as a starter comes just a couple days after Anthony Rizzo made his debut with the Chicago Cubs, who gave up Cashner to get the celebrated young hitter in trade on Jan. 6 of this year.

Cashner made the Opening Day roster for the Padres, of course, but began the season in the bullpen. The Padres wanted to bring him along slowly — no easy feat for a guy who routinely throws in the 100-102 mph range — knowing that he’d missed most of the 2011 season with a rotator-cuff strain after his only start for the Cubs.

When reactivated by the Cubs, Cashner was a reliever for all six of his appearances, and he began his tenure with the Padres primarily as their eighth-inning guy. He maintained from the start that his goal was to simply prove that his shoulder injury was a thing of the past, no matter how he was being used, and his eye- and glove-popping velocity pretty much bore that out.

With all the injuries to Padres starters, Cashner became more of a consideration for a role in the rotation. He was given a chance to be a kind of starter-with-asterisk on June 9 at Milwaukee, limited to just 47 pitches over 2 1/3 innings, the Padres sticking to their plan to let Cashner stretch out his arm further with some minor league starts.

“It definitely caught me by surprise,” said Cashner. “I didn’t think I’d get a shot this year. We’d talked about me getting the opportunity maybe next year to start again. Main thing was, they just wanted me to stay healthy this year and get back to pitching. When they asked me if I wanted to, I was excited for the opportunity.”

Beyond the obvious difficulty the Padres have had with their rotation, Black said he and the team wanted the time to study Cashner’s makeup and delivery through spring training and the first two months of the season. As a reliever, Cashner compiled a 3-3 record, 3.81 ERA and four blown saves.

“We felt the timing was right,” said Black. “It just didn’t make sense to thrust a starting role on him right from spring training. Because he pitched (10 2/3) innings last year, and the year before that, he had 53 games out of the bullpen. Doing this now, you’re looking at possibly at half a season of starts for him.”

In three starts with San Antonio, Cashner went 2-0 with a 1.88 ERA and an opponents batting average under .200. In his last outing, he shut out Midland over six innings, striking out 10. More importantly, he got up to 94 pitches.

In the process, Cashner said, he focused more on controlling the running game and working on his slider and curve. Being a starter brings with it more of yet another skill.

“I’m still struggling with the hitting,” Cashner said with a chuckle. “It’ll get there, though.”